Birds of Play or Prey

I had a strange experience this morning, while walking into the plant site I heard a very strange a loud noise. I quickly scanned the horizons and this screeching was directly in front of me and was a sound I couldn’t distinguish but sounded like a bird , a big bird as it was so loud, I couldn’t see anything flying overhead and had to keep searching round the round until only 50 feet from me was a turkey vulture that was sat on a low roof. It was looking directly at me and screeching its head off. Why it was there and why it was doing this isn’t obvious to me, perhaps there was something to eat close by and it was afraid to come down and take it while we were all about. I have never seen a vulture so close before and it felt a little unnerving, thee were many birds of prey catching the thermals again as the sun came out after lunch and I tried to identify again, this time with my binoculars but the speed they were flying at was too great and I couldn’t keep them in focus for long enough or close enough to get a good close look at them. They have yellow legs and that is about as much as I know, as well as some reddish flight feathers on the wing tips and a white bar across the tail, what am I supposed to do with such a small amount of detail. There was up to a dozen flying round the towers and I was tempted to climb the towers to get a look down on top of them and see the real colours not in silhouette. It is so frustrating to only get a little of what they really look like, they had such a indistinct colouration that is was hard to make any remarks to identify them apart from the red flight feathers and yellow legs. They were playing with insects letting them drop from their talons and then stoop dive and catch it again, never seen such acrobatics from a birds before. They were just entertaining themselves chasing round and catching the huge thermals and then stooping and diving really fast, no wonder I couldn’t identify them, but I have found a great site called Mangoverde World Bird Guide , here you can scroll through many of the worlds birds until you find the one that gives you exactly what you are looking for, there are 4500 birds to look through but it isn’t difficult as you have a good idea of what it is. So I found the hawk finally here and its name is the Roadside Hawk, beautiful.

Well worth the 6 hours it took me to find it. I have had a problem keeping awake today, something to do with the fact they got me out of bed to restart the turbines 2 night ago and I haven’t recovered from it yet, I was snoring sat next to the specialist who had flown in to do the remote monitoring server setup and he was speaking on the phone to people and he tried to talk loud to cover up my increasingly loud snoring. He eventually woke me and asked me to do something for him just to stop me snoring, but as soon as I got back and sat down I was snoring again, what an amateur I must have seemed. I still haven’t gotten over the no break from Malabo and the jetlag and not really having a break for 4 months now. I should complain to my boss and demand more money or something or a job in Brazil maybe.